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G.M. Says Toyota Has Lead in Global Sales Race

DETROIT — General Motors said on Wednesday that the slowdown in the United States market had led to a first-quarter sales decline that gave Toyota the early lead in this year’s global sales race.

G.M. said its first-quarter sales fell less than 1 percent, leaving it about 160,000 vehicles behind its Japanese rival, whose sales grew 2.7 percent.

Toyota sold 2.41 million vehicles to G.M.’s 2.25 million. Toyota outsold G.M. in the same period a year ago but ended the year about 3,100 vehicles short of G.M.

But G.M. could have more difficulty keeping pace this year as record crude oil prices and gasoline prices near $4 a gallon damp demand for vehicles in the United States, where G.M.’s market share is still considerably larger than Toyota’s.

On Wednesday, G.M. became the latest automaker to predict that the industry was just now entering its worst months of the year. It said the second quarter, when car sales typically are strong, could end up being the slowest period of the year.

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Mr. DiGiovanni said G.M. had raised its forecast for oil prices twice recently, though he did not reveal what range the company now expected. Crude oil for June delivery settled at more than $118 a barrel Wednesday on the New York Mercantile Exchange, and the average price of regular gas reached a record high of $3.533 a gallon, according to the AAA motor club.

Still, Mr. DiGiovanni said that G.M. remained upbeat about the latter part of the year, when it believed a recovery could begin. “The fundamentals are in place for a second-half recovery,” he said. “We’re starting to see the positive signs that we thought we would see.”

Chrysler made a similar prediction but has since backed away, saying it was not counting on a significant improvement in the market this year.

G.M. hopes sales growth in other countries will allow it to remain the world’s largest automaker, a title it has had for 77 years. In the first quarter, 64 percent of G.M.’s total sales occurred outside the United States, the most ever. Sales grew 78 percent in Russia and 58 percent in India. North America was the only region in which G.M. did not set a sales record.

Company executives have said they were more concerned with returning G.M. to profitability than staying ahead of Toyota. G.M. lost more than $50 billion from 2005 to 2007, though nearly $39 billion was from an accounting charge in 2007.

Still, G.M. does not plan to cede any ground without a fight.

“We obviously want to win,” Mr. DiGiovanni said. “We want to be No. 1 in sales at the end of the year, and we’re going to compete very hard to do that. But our goal is profitable sustainable growth around the world.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: G.M. Says Toyota Has Lead in Global Sales Race. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe